New Theme: Oulipo

August 16, 2010

Lance Willett

Are you tired of clutter? Are you looking for a theme that puts the focus on your content and gets out of the way? Meet Oulipo, our newest theme. Oulipo’s clean, grid-based design and elegant typography make it perfect for a one-page announcement site, a photoblog, a journal… or anything else you choose to showcase.

You’ll notice the unique placement of the left-side menu: it’s pinned in place. This keeps the site title, description, and main navigation in view at all times. A screenshot isn’t good enough—see it in action on the Oulipo demo site.

Make Oulipo your own with your choice of light or dark color schemes, background color, header image, and custom menu. Tip: If you choose a dark-colored background, switch first to the dark color scheme in Appearance → Theme Options to take advantage of contrasting text and border colors.

Example of Oulipo's gorgeous dark color scheme.

The simple beauty of this theme is a sight for sore eyes. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do.

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Will there ever be any more flexible-width, two-column, moderately customizable themes?

Fixed-width themes seem to be great for single-image, short-text posts, but my rather tech-oriented posts often have multiple pictures and wide sourcecode blocks. It’d be nice to fill the screen with the post, rather than lose half the pixels to those stylish blank columns.

Rubric is getting a bit long in the tooth… but there aren’t many alternatives!

Hmm, it looks pretty good, but in my opinion your previous themes are more stunning than this one. Like there’s nothing very special to its appearance. Great job, nevertheless. Keep up the good work and good luck on the next one!

“Are you looking for a theme that puts the focus on your content and gets out of the way?”

Yes, I should be, but I don’t have the self-discipline. Consequently, my blog looks like my house and is full to the brim with all the stuff I’m frightened of losing. One day I’ll go minimal. More power to those who can…

This looks like a very good theme for the photo-video blog that I intend to start. I’d consider it for my already existing blog, but I was counting that on a wider main column for text. But anyhow, thanks for the new addition, Theme Team!

Beautiful theme and I especially love the left menu that stays in place. I always knew something was missing on my blog and that’s what it was! I don’t know if I can incorporate this theme into my blog, but I’m definitely going to try it. I just changed to the Coraline theme. Any chance that pinned down menu can become an option on that one? In any case, thanks for keeping WordPress so up to date. I recommend it to everyone without reservation.

I did. Unfortunately, Andrea’s reversed colors (dark background, white text) is absolutely the wrong choice for a tech blog: hard to read, clashes with colorized source code blocks, and wrecks the contrast for most of my pictures. It also has a rather low upper limit for the “flexible” width setting: lots of wasted space on a 1600×1200 monitor, which isn’t all that large these days.

WordPress.com has over 100 themes, yet maybe a dozen are flexible width. Seems like everybody prefers to jam their posts into a tiny peephole down the middle of big screens, surrounded by blank space. Vertical scrolling FTW, eh?

How about another dozen really flexible themes, with the options and tweakage found in all those fixed themes?

Thank you for the new theme. The menu doesn’t disappear out of site – a definite plus. But I’d concur with some other wp-users here – a theme with a customizable width for the content area would be great. I am thoroughly enjoying using WordPress – it’s probably the most user-friendly blogging application in the world. 🙂

You guys are too much, I mean how many themes that look great can you make? It is a nightmare for me as a fairly new crime blogger to find the right theme. Just when I think I have settled on one I go back and peek at the themes again and you have another great looking theme for us…

Well it’s kind of ‘OK’. But seriously guys ‘n girls, I am getting a bit tired by yet another minimalistic theme. Why don’t you guys have a blast and publish the most feature rich and strongly designed theme ever? As a nice, over the top showcase of WordPress functionality and versatility. Come on, go baroque or burlesque!

publish the most feature rich and strongly designed theme ever… as a nice, over the top showcase of WordPress functionality and versatility

Been there, done that! The new default WordPress theme Twenty Ten, and others inspired by it, like Coraline are super-strong and showcase almost every single feature available in a theme. We’ve already seen some superb adaptations and customizations on those two themes.

Come on, go baroque or burlesque!

We’re always looking for new ideas for themes, so if you know of any that match “baroque or burlesque” we’d love to learn of them in our themes forum. Drop us a link to the theme, and why you think it should be included on WordPress.com.

Yeah, it’s a nice one, but I was looking forward to a theme with customizable colors you know… like Vigilance. I’ve tried but it gets too thin and plain looking so please design something with customizable colors and good features. 🙂 Hope you’ll see to it. 🙂

For green themes, explore the themes from your Dashboard by going to Appearance > Themes and click Feature Filters at the far right near the search field. Click one or more filters (in this case, green color), then click Apply Filters to see themes that match.

WP is really spoiling us for good. 😀 I am so tempted to change to this one cos i LOVE clean cluster-less look. I LOVE the pinned down left menu but what if i have a lot of pages? I have seven pages currently (planning to add more later) and when I tried the preview just now, part of my left menu was cropped off. Hmm, maybe it will just affect the preview but I’m so afraid to activate the theme.